Roger Cracel
I have spent nearly twenty years running engineering, most of it as the CTO of companies going through the part where things either scale or break. I joined RainKing when it was under $10M in revenue with four engineers; DiscoverOrg acquired it and made me CTO of the combined company, which grew from $72M to $170M and became part of ZoomInfo in an $800M transaction. At Datassential I built the product organization, shipped a new product line that reached $5M in recurring revenue in its first year, and retired two products my own cost analysis showed were losing money. At Seamless.AI we earned SOC 2 Type 2 in under eight months and took roadmap delivery from about 55% to over 90% with a smaller team. Before any of that, I turned around an FAA program that was five years late.
I have been evaluating engineers and engineering leaders for more than a decade, and I hire for potential and ethics over credentials; the best people I have worked with were rarely the ones with the most impressive resumes. I have founded a company myself, so I know what it is to make technical decisions with no one to check them against.
I live in New Market, Maryland, and work in person with founders from Washington to Boston, and remotely with everyone else.
Why Loch Vale
A hanging valley, a lake, and forty years of careful measurement.
Loch Vale is a hanging valley in Rocky Mountain National Park, a glacial basin that holds a lake called The Loch. I was married on its shore. It is also one of the longest continuously studied watersheds in the country, measured every year since 1983, which seemed like the right name for a practice built on looking carefully at how things actually work.
